Thursday, 31 December 2015

What, did you think just because I started a series called '24 Doodles' on December 1st, it was some kind of advent thing? Well, I don't know where you got that idea. I'm sure I never said so. No, the idea was always to post one every one or two days for about a fortnight, and then the rest all in one splurge on New Year's Eve. So here, as part of the plan that was definitely the plan all along, are the other nine. Happy New Year!

16. First try at a young Ezra Pound, July, British Library, working on 'English For Pony-Lovers'.

Tuesday, 15 December 2015

(The red stains on both come from a drop of candle wax, which fell on the second page, and then, next time I left the book in the sun, melted and seeped through to the first page as well. I rather like the way that, purely by chance, this makes the second stain look like a stylised version of the first.)

Sunday, 13 December 2015

You know I said a while ago sometimes my doodling is extremely literal minded? Well, here's half a page of notes from Dorset in September on Red-Handed. Yeah. It's not exactly wild, creative, free association, is it?

(By the way... I would just like to make it clear that I'm not putting these - any of these - doodles up because I think they're good. They're all genuinely what I was doodling in the margins while I was working, and so most of them are rubbish- these hands certainly are. This is not 'Behold - pages from my sketchbook' it's 'Look what nonsense my hands got up to while my brain was trying to solve plot problems.')

Saturday, 12 December 2015

Here is a marginal piglet from Tuttlingen in Germany in May, in a pleasant Gasthaus where I ended up doing so much useful plot work on English For Pony Lovers that I set the episode there in its honour.

Thursday, 10 December 2015

More experimenting with repetition to achieve stylisation, this time from March, in a fish restaurant in Greece. By the end I got to something which I think would make quite a fun character design for a druid or something, but really has very little to do with the poor chap enjoying his calamari across the way. For one thing, he seemed to age twenty years with each iteration...

Meanwhile, the notes are the very first seed of what eventually became The Goliath Window, though as you can see nothing about the story beyond the first idea of 'portrait painter and sitter' emerged that evening, with the possible exception of the idea of a model's discomfort at having to pose upside down for St Peter, which arguably eventually turned into the 'holding the spear aloft' sequence. Though just as arguably, it didn't.

(Incidentally, the French painter I was trying to remember was Géricault. )

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Back to the Souvenir Programme notebook, and back to a bloke who sat near me in a pub, this time in Hampstead. Poor blokes who sit near me in pubs. One day, one them's going to notice. That will be a bad day for me. (Though if it happens in Hampstead, I'll probably be ok.)

Monday, 7 December 2015

Here's a little bit of research I diligently did into stained glass terminology for The Goliath Window at the British Library in October... none of which ended up in the script. But then, you never know what will be useful until you do it.

That 'Why's it funny?' question was one I had to keep reminding myself to ask whilst writing Double Acts - it was easy to get seduced by the story-telling aspects, and then realise later a page had gone by without any jokes. The answers I came up with here are largely not the answers I ended up with, but at least it reminded me to bear in mind it was a comedy.

Saturday, 5 December 2015

Changing notebooks, here's a quick and scrappy doodle of a sphinx from a page of my Souvenir Programme notebook where I was trying to work out a sketch about the riddle of the Sphinx. Sometimes my doodling can be quite literal-minded.

They haven't been all that doodle-y yet, have they? Here's a properly doodle-y one, from May, when I was working on Wysinnwyg in Dorset. It started off entirely abstract, but I think at the last minute the middle section sort of morphed into a picture of one of the characters...

Friday, 4 December 2015

This chap was sitting along from me in the British Library in June, while I was working on what became English For Pony Lovers. I've been trying to learn to be more stylistic with my drawing, which I only seem to be able to do by doing the same drawing repeatedly, only more so each time.

Thursday, 3 December 2015

A quick sketch of Evelyn Waugh, drawn in March, on the island of Kos, whilst listening to an interview with him which contained the seed from which A Flock of Tigers grew. The man from whom Edmund Willard got his initials, and some of his opinions. (Though Edmund is fundamentally nicer than I fear Evelyn was, at least by this age.)

Tuesday, 1 December 2015

This chap sat over the way from me in the Union Jack pub in Waterloo this February, while I was working on the plot that eventually became Wysinnwyg. You might be able to read the note that says 'Is the problem that the Sues and Adele come from different sitcoms?' The answer to this was... yes.